


Templeton Rye

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, POV Sam Winchester, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 17:37:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1907850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A brief one-shot, set S4 (spoilers all the way up to 4.10). A few choice words from the hood of a beat-up Pinto.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Templeton Rye

' _Facilis descensus Averno_ : easy is the descent to Hell.'  
\--Virgil.

 

 

The light’s catching the bottle in just the right way, turning the liquid inside all silt and golden-red delight with a hint of abrasive sodium vapor lighting. He turns it on its side, watching it twist and shift and curl in upon itself to fit its glass confines just right.

Despite the light jacket he’s wearing, it’s twenty seven degrees outside. He’s sitting on the hood of a rusted Pinto abandoned by the side of the road, feeling Iowa winter sift down around him in clumps of white. It melts in his hair, trickling down onto his face, and he tries to snatch up a few snowflakes in the mist of his breath and trap them there.

He’s feeling surly and spiteful, despite the bottle of whiskey in his hands, or perhaps because of. He turns it on end, splashing it across the light dusting on the gravel road. It slashes his footprints in half with drips of dark.

Without twisting the cap back down he slides to the ground, the alcohol splashing up and dripping down his sleeve with a stench of Templeton Rye.

“You know,” he starts conversationally, and he’s pointing at the car, although the car is not pointing back. “Somewhere a man is having a drink.”

The car’s headlights stare at him apathetically.

“This man is likely 50-something, and maybe he’s torched a few bones and offed a few ghuls and saved a few children. Maybe he has a mild case of halitosis, and is rather fond of Jack Daniel’s, despite the fact that it makes him a bit of an angry drunk. Maybe his trunk is full of illegal weapons and maybe his wallet’s got six different IDs, none of them real. Maybe he’s never had a ‘real’ job. Maybe all his buddies would be declared schizophrenic by any passing psychologist. Maybe he’s divorced twice because he’s never home enough. But you know what? He’s living okay, and he gets to shoot things for a living. Things that are actually bad, not just sort-of-maybe bad, like the Iranians or Afghanis or Vietnamese.”

He pauses. “No, wait, we finished that last one. Anyway. The point is, this man is _okay_.” With another hollow ‘sploosh’ he shoves the bottle forward, blood-red whiskey dripping between his fingers. “And yet we," he adds emphatically, "are not okay.

“Twenty-nine and…” He has to stop and count in his head. “Twenty-five, we’ve lived a little over half of that man’s life and we are so far from okay I don’t think we could find it on a god-damned map.”

There’s a pause for a minute while he glances around, checking for an actual audience. People have a habit of materializing as of late.

Once he’s absorbed the weight of the quiet for a bit he breathes in with a shudder and starts again, slow and quiet and angry. “Technically we’re both post mortem before we hit the age of thirty and for what?” The great orator takes a pause, examining the liquid frosting the lip of the bottle, and then he’s barreling onward, voice getting louder. “If this is what the world is about then why bother? So some jackass can have his goddamn scotch? So some redneck asshole can beat his wife every night, and some fucked-up kid can shoot up his eighth grade English class, and we can throw our lives down for people that’ll never know our goddamned names and never care to know because they’re too afraid of what we’ve been dealing with since we were kids?

“ _Facilis descensus Averno_ , except we didn’t go there, we were _thrown_ down there, and nobody could be bothered to throw down a goddamned rope.” And he breathes in a whisper of, “Four months.”

He wheels on the empty field, the weak filtered moonlight turning everything into a hazy blue shadow world. “He’s all I have. So don’t you dare fucking touch him.” A threatening advance of one step, two. The weeds shift uneasily in a passing breeze, loose snow throwing everything into temporary disarray. “Don’t you put this on him, don’t you put this on _either_ of us, not like everyone else has.”

The light post falls prey next. “This angel on one shoulder and demon on the other stuff is _bullshit_. Some great big ploy to turn us on each other, is that it? Is that all this is? Turn one of us out into the desert and throw the other on the altar?”

The shadows loom at him as he stalks out of the ring of light, kicking angrily at a mound of snow to watch it flurry back down. “Fuck this. Fuck you! We don’t have to listen. We don’t have to be what we’re told to be.

“We don’t have to be anything, and we don’t have to make these kind of decisions.” His voice has turned pleading somewhere along the way, pleading and raw and leading up to a shout. “We don’t have to be alone and we don’t have to go to Hell or _lead_ Hell or have anything to _do_ with Hell.” Or live there or breathe there or die there for four months _forty years_ \-- “You _can’t make us_ because we never did _anything_ to deserve this, and we don’t have to accept it, we don’t have to take what—“ He gasps, and reels, and gathers his breath for a hoarse yell that will never be loud enough. “—what _You_ dump on us just because it’s _You_ dumping it on us. So y’know what? _Fuck off._ ”

He pauses, watching his breath condense and fade and condense again, and repeats with a shout, “You listening? You hear me?” He shoves a fist into the sky and bellows it. “ _FUCK OFF._ ”

Without much thought at all he swings his arm in a sharp arc, feeling the muscles pull in his chest with the quick motion, wondering if they’ll shatter with all the pressure built up there. The bottle strikes the pavement a good fifteen feet off, splashing bright red arterial spray across the snow before melting into an indefinable splotch of shadow.

“Of course You can’t fucking hear me,” Sam mutters and turns back.

“Dude, you didn’t even drink any of that.” The voice has him reaching for his knife before he manages to recognize it. Dean’s leaning casually against the car’s flaking roof, snow thick on his shoulders and in his hair.

Sam stares at him blankly for the better part of a minute, and Dean stares back at him, waiting, his face as unreadable as it has been for five months.

With a military-crisp three-point turn he walks off in the other direction. His footsteps are a trail of black under the moonlight.

 

__

finis


End file.
